


Reduce, Reuse, Reincarnate

by boundbyspells



Category: Being Erica
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 08:18:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8883625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boundbyspells/pseuds/boundbyspells
Summary: Kai retires to the countryside to work on his latte art.  Quantum theory nearly ensues.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elapses](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elapses/gifts).



When Kai finds himself watching video tutorials for new latte art techniques, he decides to just go ahead and open a coffee shop in rural Ontario. It makes sense anyway, as much as a decision like that can make sense. He's done with cities, he's done with the band, he isn't getting any younger, and he doesn't need to get any richer.

His girlfriend, Trisha, isn't excited about the move, but she agrees that she can commute between Toronto and Poplar Corners, since she isn't ready to give up on her design business. Kai has a back-of-the-mind suspicion that he isn't her end-game, and that's all right. He himself has a small back-of-the-mind suspicion that _she_ isn't _his_ end-game either.

So Trisha renovates a huge old farmhouse for him, and he makes sure the carriage house becomes a recording studio to work on his solo projects. Above the recording studio he installs a suite of guest rooms, a place where up-and-coming young artists can come and be mentored. Mentoring satisfies, and heals some of the scars the "career" part of his music career engraved on him. In fact, music becomes his hobby again, the thing he does for love; the coffee shop becomes his career.

Actually, Antigone's ends up being a bookstore/music store/coffeeshop, because Poplar Corners doesn't have a library or a bookstore or anything related to music (except for the high school marching band); on his first day in town, Kai sees farm kids riding past on school buses with needful, wistful faces, just waiting to be filled up with art and caffeine. So he makes an art-and-caffeine dispensary, and fills the people of a remote place with them.

It passes the time.

In between solo albums, mentoring, and vitalizing a town, Kai grows and changes and gets on with therapy. The transformation of his being-in-love-with-Erica energy into missing-Erica-forever energy does suck some of the exuberance out of life, but he settles in. He gets through his second year of Solo Therapy, then picks a door and graduates to Group. Trisha gets her own home decorating TV show, which gets picked up by HGTV in the US, and it's not entirely because the producers love having him in the background of every other episode. Which is good, because Trisha leaves him at the start of Season Two.

He's a little bitter about it in Group. He hasn't quite remembered that his back-of-the-mind suspicions about Trisha cut both ways.

" _Forge a real life,_ you said. _Forge a real relationship_ , you said. _In the present,_ you said," he rants at Doctor Fred.

Victoire speaks up. "Do you really think that you get 'real life' and 'real relationship' right on the first try, Kai?" she asks. There's something about the way francophone women ask sharp questions: the knife cuts more cleanly, and you don't realize how deep the cut is until much later.

Davide says, "Hold on, hold on, hold on, there's no objective standard of rightness here, friends."

Victoire ends up accompanying Kai back to a regret involving a girl he was dating in the early part of his tenure at Goblins, who also wanted a long distance relationship. Back then he'd have none of it. The regret helps him forgive Trisha, and maybe also Erica. How had she sarcastically phrased it? "Let's be bi-coastal and in live in the present and the past." It's too much, that kind of distance.

The regret also throws into stark relief how much he fucking misses Erica Strange.

#

Kai had never imagined that the Doctor Test would be so brutal--and he had a pretty healthy sense of the brutality of the time traveling Doctors who had saved his life.

But it turns out failure of the test wasn't so bad. It's not like you have to quit therapy. You got a new group, and you did the next bunch of crap on your list. His list was so long. So, so long.

#

Kai hires a trio of high school kids to help run the book side of thing. They are so earnest and filled with poetry. They speak to him in breathless rhythms with bouncy vocal shifts, as if someone had edited out the natural _ums_ and silences between clauses out of their speech and injected them with too much enthusiasm. They over-enunciate like YouTube celebrities, and then he discovers they _are_ YouTube celebrities, that there's a goddamn YouTube channel called Breakfast at Antigone's (Shayla earnestly explains to him that liking Audrey Hepburn doesn't actually make you basic. Kai arts up a teddy bear in her latte just to make the conversation stop).

Kai is So Done hearing about YouTube, but when he's So Done with anything, that means a regret is waiting in the wings. He avoids it for a while: he mentors a folk duo through an album; he bargains at an estate sale for what amounts to a new sci-fi section for the store; he practices doing 3D latte art with piles of milk foam. Then he buckles down and attends to the regrets of his thirteen-year-old army-brat self. After six hours in Suffield, he's done. It's maybe the fastest regret Kai's ever managed, yet unlikely to be the fastest regret ever--though Kai understands he holds the unofficial record for longest.

When he comes back from turn-of-the-millennia Alberta, he is really, really not expecting to see Erica Strange talking to Shayla by the old Goblins samovar.

"Erica," he says with seriously flat affect because he honestly thought she was dead and he's afraid of the fountain of joy that wants to burst out of his chest. Her hair is seal-sleek, but the same rich auburn. She is older than she was and even more beautiful.

"Kai," she says, and her smile is gentle but bright, an early evening star.

"Erica!" His smile, he can feel it, is the sun.

They embrace, with the awkward awareness of the passage of time and of a teenager avidly watching them.

"Maybe some--" Erica says, then stops.

"Certainly," Kai says, and whisks her back behind the coffee bar, towards the offices.

Kai waves her through the door. They both tense briefly--Kai always expects a Threshold Redirect from his Doctor, and he wonders if Erica does too.

But no, they just walk through to the offices together. Xavier, his assistant, looks up as they pass through, squints at Erica, and then looks back down at his desk, then looks up again with wide eyes and slight panic. Xavier has been set to searching for Erica enough times to recognize her on sight. And here she is, not-dead. On the other hand, someone being not-dead is a not-emergency, and Xavier hasn't been Kai's assistant for three years without learning how to float above his own emotions. He goes back to his computer.

Erica scrutinizes Kai's office, which is in between phases, morphing from Trisha's initial sparse design into a functional but memento-laden space. It is not quite how Kai imagines his Doctor's office would have been, but … close.

"This room is the most perfect room I could imagine for you," Erica says, studying his wall of stringed instruments: lutes, mandolins, guitars.

"Thanks." He runs his hands through his hair, feeling lost.

His tone isn't meant to convey anything, but it must, because she turns and looks at him, and then sees something in his face--he doesn't mean to convey anything there, either--and she puts her arms around him. He accepts this opportunity to touch her, and pulls her in close, and they stand quite still, breathing together, being together.

"Can I kiss you?" he whispers after uncountable time.

"Yes," she whispers back, her voice as ragged as his, and he's grateful that he's not the only one on the verge of tears.

Kissing Erica in that moment is exactly like his whole history of time travel. His brain is three brains living simultaneously in the past, the present, and the future. He wants too much. He needs too much. He doesn't know how to ask for any of it. He breaks off the kiss and says, "I missed you so much," brokenly against her mouth, and she just kisses him again, and it's exactly like being deep in caloric debt, like thirty-seven hundred calories in the hole, and being given only a fucking salad, which happened on tour once, and he remembers biting savagely at the fork and eating and eating and eating so much lettuce and oil and thinking _I will never get enough this way, it will never be enough, I'm only growing weaker as I go._ Eventually, someone gave him a steak and a baked potato.

He breaks the kiss again and rests his forehead against hers. "I thought you were dead. Why couldn't I find you?"

"It's… complicated."

He pulls back to look at her, and she smiles an unconvincing apology.

She says, "I became a Doctor. Did you know I became a Doctor?"

"It seemed inevitable. Congratulations, Erica."

"Thanks." She nods, eyes darting down and to the side, thinking thoughts and not letting him in on them. He lets his hands drop from her shoulders. They stand awkwardly together.

"So here we are," he says. "Contemporaneously."

"Yes." She touches her lips. "I, ah. Didn't ask? But that kiss--"

"I'm single." Kai says it so fast that if he were running, he'd be tripping over his own feet.

"Me too."

"Adam--?"

"We're--divorced. For two years now. My head's on straight about it now. Mostly."

"I'm… sorry," he says. "Divorce is hard."

"Nothing to be sorry about," she says, firming her lips in that Erica way that is some kind of tell, though there's far more than one emotional state involved in that expression. "We had a mostly good marriage, and we have an _awesome_ kid together."

"A kid?" Kai smiles, happy to see the light in her eyes.

"Yes. His name is Leo, he's eight, and he's an amazing writer."

He nods. "I'm so glad, Erica." He wants to say, _I want to meet him_. He wants to say, _Do you still love me?_ He wants to say, _I still love you_.

Instead he settles for telling her about Antigone's and latte art and the poetry kids and the recording studio. And she smiles. He realizes he's babbling. There's too much emotion and not enough truth. He doesn't know how to come back around, to accept that this is real. For a horrible moment, he thinks this is another Doctor Test.

"Kai," Erica interrupts. "Tell me what you're thinking."

"You're good. You're a brilliant Doctor, I bet."

"I'm still human."

"But are you?" he bursts out. "You were dead. Are dead. Aren't you?"

"I'm a Doctor. This is the only fact that matters in the face of that question."

"I'm usually the enigmatic one," he says.

She laughs.

"But I haven't seen you in over three years, and you haven't seen me in… twelve?" he guesses.

"Close enough."

He smiles painfully. "Why are you here, Erica? Because if it's just to amend regrets, we have therapy for that."

She looks up at the ceiling. "You know, I think I did the right thing, by insisting that we not commute. That we not abuse Doctor powers to do something that didn't help us live in our respective times. But I know at the same time, I also did the wrong thing--I turned a reason into an excuse. And that--I don't beat myself up about that--but it still wasn't the totally _right_ thing to do. I ran away from you, Kai, and I'm sorry. You…" She lets out a deep breath. "It's a cliche, but you scared me."

He considers all the things that he considers scary about himself, and can only agree. He wouldn't know how to count on someone with his history. Erica was in a different class of therapy patient than him. She was self-sabotaging, maybe, but not outright self-destructive. Not a drug addict. Not a suicide risk.

"Oh god," she says, and bends at the waist for a moment. He's jostled from his bubble of self-hating self-reflection, startled, trying to figure out if she's going to puke or pass out or what.

"Erica--?"

"No, it's just. I'm supposed to be better at this." She straightens up, and her face is flushed. "Kai. You always… appreciated me for me. You were beautifully accepting of me. It was… a thrilling thing. And it scared the shit out of me."

Of all the things that Kai had thought he'd done wrong with regard to Erica Strange, this was not one he would have thought of.

"Erica… I have to know. Have you been hiding from me because of _that_?"

"What?" She seems honestly startled. "Oh. No. I wasn't that… stupid. You couldn't find me because I died."

He tries to absorb this.

"I'm so sorry, that's not… Listen, when you're a Doctor, time is pretty meaningless. You may have noticed. I just--" she mashes her hands together at the palms, but without allowing her fingers to touch. "I made myself a little bit of a space time bubble? And allowed myself to be dead and not dead all at the same time? And I just went on with my life and raised Leo and kept publishing books though… somehow I don't seem to have to pay taxes anymore, and I'm not able to vote, either, so I guess it all balances."

"What."

"Listen, they train us in therapy, not science. We are taught to use the Doctor Powers on an intuitive level, but let's be real, none of us is a physicist." She purses her lips, thinking. "And that's the literal truth. I've never seen a physicist who qualifies for our therapy. Anyway. I think it's related to quantum theory. I can be dead and not dead at the same time, as long as I really don't try to… _know_."

"I see," Kai says faintly. "Is it like--there are two timelines?"

"No," Erica says. "I mean, it is _like_ that, and that may be an easier way to see it, but I think that's like the discount explanation? Anyway. Is that uncertainty about my life status--is that a problem?"

"A problem for what?"

"A problem for you--for if we--for…"

"For if we start this up again?" Kai asks bluntly.

"Yes."

"There is no impediment on my end. None. Zip. Zero. I am still in love with you, Erica Strange, and I've been looking for you."

She closes her mouth and swallows. Blinks. Kai is watching closely. And then she's there in his arms, and he's in hers, and now there's no pause, no hesitation: they begin again.


End file.
